You shall love your crooked neighbour with your crooked heart

As I Walked Out One Evening
_________________________
W. H. Auden

As I walked out one evening,
Walking down Bristol Street,
The crowds upon the pavement
Were fields of harvest wheat.

And down by the brimming river
I heard a lover sing
Under an arch of the railway:
'Love has no ending.

'I'll love you, dear, I'll love you
Till China and Africa meet,
And the river jumps over the mountain
And the salmon sing in the street,

'I'll love you till the ocean
Is folded and hung up to dry
And the seven stars go squawking
Like geese about the sky.

'The years shall run like rabbits,
For in my arms I hold
The Flower of the Ages,
And the first love of the world.

'But all the clocks in the city
Began to whirr and chime:
'O let not Time deceive you,
You cannot conquer Time.

'In the burrows of the Nightmare
Where Justice naked is,
Time watches from the shadow
And coughs when you would kiss.

'In headaches and in worry
Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have his fancy
To-morrow or to-day.

'Into many a green valley
Drifts the appalling snow;
Time breaks the threaded dances
And the diver's brilliant bow.

'O plunge your hands in water,
Plunge them in up to the wrist;
Stare, stare in the basin
And wonder what you've missed.

'The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the tea-cup opens
A lane to the land of the dead.

'Where the beggars raffle the banknotes
And the Giant is enchanting to Jack,
And the Lily-white Boy is a Roarer,
And Jill goes down on her back.

'O look, look in the mirror,
O look in your distress:
Life remains a blessing
Although you cannot bless.

'O stand, stand at the window
As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbor
With your crooked heart.'

It was late, late in the evening,
The lovers they were gone;
The clocks had ceased their chiming,
And the deep river ran on.
_____________________


What cuts the deepest in the poem are the little ironies that Auden sprinkles from verse to verse, the easy incongruity that underlies and undermines life, natural as rhyme. The pallor of night in the evening sky, the trauma of a field chopped down for harvest, the hollowness of the lover’s declarations of eternal love as he stands framed by an arch that inevitably rises and falls from point to point, as do the trains on the railway which rush onward to a final destination. Ironies quickly lapse into absurdities in the lover’s speech, but Auden’s more subtle jokes never go away. The first love of the world—that of Adam and Eve, which ended in the first sin and the introduction of death into the world. 

Neither is the speech of the clocks free from Auden’s scorn. For the clocks do not heed their own warnings: the personification of Time as if it were something humanly comprehensible, the whirring and chiming of the clocks as if it were something to be broken down and brought under control. And in the end their deceit and self-importance are laid bare. When the evening darkens, when love and its songs have faded, when time passes without the chiding of the clocks, the only thing left unchanged is the river: brimming at the start of the poem and still running deep at the end, but insensitive to notions of first and last. It has neither spilled over nor dipped under, and I cannot be sure what Auden meant but perhaps the only thing certain is that the river does not brim with promise; none has been given and none should be expected. The waters run, and run deep, but they are silent.
 

A clasp in the dark

I write this to remember a moment shared, in a room now quietened by your absence. As usual it was the unwhole, throbbing sweetness of unasked questions that sounded with the greatest possibilities; a clasp in the dark. As usual, the words I spoke were the ones that mattered least to me, even in an evening of my own design, set to music of my own making. 

Fruition in love is a concatenation of circumstance, conviction and courage, and I think courage is the most important of all. I have lacked the daring. To take the leap when it was necessary, to hold one's heart in one's mouth: I refused, as usual, and could only watch as probabilities divorced themselves from possibilities and drifted mutely apart. 

I nevertheless have to thank you for such a moment as I have hardly felt in these three florid years. I have only courage sufficient to express myself in the silence of this writing. I told you that you were like another, but it was only another failed ploy of mine to say what I felt without telling the truth. I don't believe there is anyone else like you in the world. 

Upon the horizon

How much I would give for permanence, certainty and some absolutes. I live in the woeful in-betweens of expectation and aspiration, always striving and reaching, living with effort and on the strength of self-belief. As much as I have been forgotten I have forgotten myself. I cannot locate myself even in this place with a history so immense and a culture so amorphous, and home—home is a conclusion built upon premises I have not yet constructed, a destination clouded by the distance of ambition. In time to come I may not recognise it, nor may it welcome me any longer, and then we would pass each other by. Because home may be an island, but it is also shaped by the tide.  

Hidden lives

Her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

Middlemarch

George Eliot

Free space

In the moments between the moments that we remember, when our eyes are cast to the sky and not set to purpose, we find a little of that peace and free will that was promised to us but that we often forget we have. The drawings scrawled across the clouds with our fingertips we leave dangling in the air, and seek instead letters stricken in stone, ground with steel and fire into the permanency of memories not our own. The free will we leave behind. In the moments of indecision, the brackets of blue sky between buildings, in the distance from thought to thought. Before the point of the spear, the quivering of its shaft, the arch of the arm or the release of strength: in the sterile stillness of free space where the violence of purpose is born.

Law like Love

Law, say the gardeners, is the sun,
Law is the one
All gardeners obey
Tomorrow, yesterday, today.

Law is the wisdom of the old,
The impotent grandfathers feebly scold;
The grandchildren put out a treble tongue,
Law is the senses of the young.

Law, says the priest with a priestly look,
Expounding to an unpriestly people,
Law is the words in my priestly book,
Law is my pulpit and my steeple.

Law, says the judge as he looks down his nose,
Speaking clearly and most severely,
Law is as I've told you before,
Law is as you know I suppose,
Law is but let me explain it once more,
Law is The Law.

Yet law-abiding scholars write:
Law is neither wrong nor right,
Law is only crimes
Punished by places and by times,
Law is the clothes men wear
Anytime, anywhere,
Law is Good morning and Good night.

Others say, Law is our Fate;
Others say, Law is our State;
Others say, others say
Law is no more,
Law has gone away.

And always the loud angry crowd,
Very angry and very loud,
Law is We,
And always the soft idiot softly Me.

If we, dear, know we know no more
Than they about the Law,
If I no more than you
Know what we should and should not do
Except that all agree
Gladly or miserably
That the Law is
And that all know this
If therefore thinking it absurd
To identify Law with some other word,
Unlike so many men
I cannot say Law is again,

No more than they can we suppress
The universal wish to guess
Or slip out of our own position
Into an unconcerned condition.
Although I can at least confine
Your vanity and mine
To stating timidly
A timid similarity,
We shall boast anyway:
Like love I say.

Like love we don't know where or why,
Live love we can't compel or fly,
Like love we often weep,
Like love we seldom keep.

_______________
W.H. Auden

The momentum of a moment

You know how glass shatters when it encounters a violence it has no hope of absorbing, how the shards twinkle when the surface erupts in horror as breaking point is reached, how they throw off a sudden confusion of coloured lights that is the trauma of becoming unwhole. It strikes from the darkness, this memory that is not mine but which hurls at my consciousness a force of emotion which must have been yours. It is a living source of hate which has accumulated only density and impermeability through the passage of years, a rock hardening under the weight of time, unable to forget itself into non-existence. It hurtles through the shadows and the the scenery of a past blackening in its wake, and it brings to the surface of my mind a force I cannot withstand. It breaches the back of the mirror with a momentum unchecked by your forgetfulness or my forgiveness, the brutal momentum of a moment that was yours and another's and not mine, and as I look into the mirror my reflection and the calm around me are thrown into motion, a thousand silvery shards throwing the face of my own fear back into my flesh. Perhaps the pain will drain itself out when the blood stops flowing. Perhaps I can wear my broken face into the happiness and the future we imagine. Perhaps not.